History of the Writing Center

Page Content

​

The Alabama A&M Writing Center helps to develop better writers and learners as they advance in their college career. It is designed for students who want to improve writing skills and have a greater sense of confidence in their ability to communicate effectively. Whether they are enrolled in an English course or another course, the Writing Center provides the tools and resources they will need to succeed.

When the Writing Center began in 2002, it was housed in an overcrowded office space with three English instructors. On August 29, 2005, the Writing Center opened up at its current location, a single brick building interior with strategically placed computer stations, resource areas, printing area, study/work areas, and a classroom-like conference space. The AAMU Writing Center aims to assist as many people as possible within its small confines. It receives assistance through the Department of English and Foreign Languages, the continued support of the Tutorial Assistance Network (TAN) program, the Office of Retention and Persistence, and the AAMU Honors Program.

Since many students come to Alabama A&M University with negative impressions about English and writing, believing it is not important or they are not good at it, they are self- inflicting barriers that can prevent them from reaching their full potential. The Writing Center has addressed this situation by creating an atmosphere at the Writing Center that allows creativity to flourish and meaningful messages to take shape. Thus, the primary focus of the Writing Center is to bridge the gap of the writing skills of Freshman English 100 and 101 students from their years as high school students. Students who successfully complete these courses develop a sense of pride in their writing and generally have an appreciation for the language.

With the help of dedicated faculty, staff, student consultants, and student volunteers, the Writing Center offers one-on-one tutoring, discussion based writing sessions, and workshops on various English and writing topics. Each semester undergraduate and graduate consultants, as well as volunteers, serve as tutors and writing mentors. The Writing Center’s workshops cover important topics such as “How to Overcoming Grammar and Usage Problems,” “How to Avoid Plagiarism,” and “How to Develop Coherent Paragraphs.” In addition, the Writing Center gives attention to creative writing, journaling, note taking, and test anxiety.

Today, the Alabama A&M University Writing Center hosts additional class sessions on a wide array of topics. Some of them include accessing the research online literary databases, using search engines, grammar, and sentence structure, comma usage, sentence fragments, writing the research paper, writing a literary analysis, writing speeches, preparing the works cited page, text citation, paragraph development, essay writing, argumentation, and portfolio assistance.